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The author of this great article is Peter Wilson and it was originally published in the Weekend Australian Magazine (of the daily The Australian). Apparently it has not been published in a complete version on the Australian website, but there is a short teaser article.

The apparently complete version which is being linked to in Deborah's posting has been posted on a website independent from The Australian; it is unclear if this inofficial publication is an authoritative one.

It really is a great article, especially Mr. Rees' statements about the unfortunate fact that it is impossible to debate with fanatics.To quote Jacopo Belbo from Umberto Eco's great novel "Foucault's Pendulum":

The insane [...] does not care about logic, he operates with short-circuits. For him, everything proves everything. The insane has a fixed idea and sees it confirmed by everything he finds. One can recognize an insane by the liberty he takes toward the burden of proof, by the readiness to find enlightenment everywhere.

(My own humble attempt at translating a german translation of the itelian original)

(...) A month later, a White House aide urged Carter that, in his executive order creating the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the permanent successor to the temporary President’s Commission on the Holocaust, he, the president, should “make clear the memorial is to honor the memory of all victims of the Holocaust--six million Jews and some five million other peoples.”[4] Another White House aide pointed out that this definition--eleven million--had been originated by Simon Wiesenthal, “whose Holocaust credentials are as good as anyone else I know.”[5] Elie Wiesel resisted this broad definition of the Holocaust, trying to finesse the matter by separating the “systematic state-sponsored extermination of six million Jews” from “the millions of other Nazi victims.” But in the end Carter refused this wording, and in issuing his executive order establishing the United States Holocaust Memorial Council he referred to eleven million victims.

(...)

From an historical point of view, all of this has a great and strange irony behind it. Where, in fact, does this eleven million number come from? Yes, it came from Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter. But where did he get it? Yehuda Bauer, the Holocaust historian, was puzzled by this question. As he has written, “The total number of non-Jewish concentration camp victims is about half a million--which is half a million too many, but it is not five million. On the other hand, the total number of dead in World War II has been estimated at thirty-five million. Deduct the nearly six million Jews, and you have many more than Wiesenthal’s five million. Yet there was no premeditated plan to murder all these people--all the members of any group. If you were a Polish peasant or city-dweller and you avoided resistance and other types of opposition, you would have suffered, no doubt, but you would not have been targeted for murder. To call what happened to the non-Jewish victims ‘the Holocaust’ is ‘simply’ false.” So where did Wiesenthal get the number eleven million, including five million non-Jews? In a private conversation, Bauer asked him that very question. And Wiesenthal told Bauer where he had gotten it. He told him that he had “invented” it. That’s right, he had made it up! And why had he invented it? He had invented it, Bauer wrote in 1989, “in order to make the non-Jews feel like they are part of us.”[6] Wiesenthal had already expressed this sentiment to a Washington Post reporter in 1979, when he told him that “Since 1948 I have sought with Jewish leaders not to talk about six million Jewish dead, but rather about eleven million civilians dead, including six million Jews.”[7] What Wiesenthal felt back in 1948 was that the non-Jewish world wouldn’t be interested in the Jewish tragedy unless they understood that non-Jews had been killed, too. So he pointed out that they were. Needing to identify a number, he made one up--5 million. And that’s the capricious number that appeared in President Carter’s executive order and that, as a result, provided the first official federal definition of the Holocaust, merging those killed as part of a unique and racially-motivated industrial genocide with those killed as part of Nazi brutality. That’s the peculiar, even bizarre way that this official and baseless number--and, far worse, this official conflation of historical tragedies, the effect of which is to rob us of a discrete event from which the whole world has much to learn--were created by presidential fiat.

Of all the many comments left on that website, one man wrote: "Fascinating article. What a strange woman!....It’s always interesting that holocaust deniers invariably also hate Jews. This proves that they are primarily driven by hatred."